Blurring the lines between Marketing and Design

I decided to study Marketing and Advertising at university as I come from a business background but I’m also quite creative. However, I didn’t realise that some content of my degree would actually require me to be skilled at designing visual content and using programs such as Photoshop and InDesign!

It’s great to learn how to use these new programs and put my thoughts onto paper, but it doesn’t go without its challenges.

Copywriting and Creativity was a module that required me to use both creative and academic input to form a portfolio of work showcasing my ability to create content for a wide variety of audiences. Each piece of the portfolio needed to be designed with lots of considerations to the target audience, how the message is portrayed, colours used, and most importantly, how language is used.

Some of the key pieces that I was personally proud are shown below with brief descriptions:

1. Mock-up Catalogue for Topshop

I decided to create a two page spread for Topshop’s embroidery range as this is one of my favourite trends this season. Using my knowledge of catalogues and magazines, I was able to create a mini “Embroidery Edit” spread using both fashion shots and still shots of the clothing. The target audience for this catalogue would be the same demographic as myself; early 20’s, passionate about fashion, student budget, tech savvy. All of these factors considered led me to creating the spread below:

2. Walsh Heating Solutions website

For this module we were allowed to use a few pieces of work that we had previously created on our placement year or in a commercial setting and so I decided to use the website that I had created for my father for his business. All of the content that went onto the website was created by yours truly and so was perfect for this project. As there is no clear audience for this website, my main focus was to create clear points of information for the website visitors, and prompts for them to enquire if they needed any more information.

3. Book Cover

One of my portfolio pieces required me to think up a storyline idea for a book, and create a book cover for it. I really enjoy reading murder mysteries and my recent favourites include Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, so I attempted to make a storyline to match something along these lines. The book I created was a made-up book by Paula Hawkins, titled “My Lover’s Baby”. The book is aimed at the same target market as those books mentioned above; mid 20’s, thriller lovers. The design of the book cover was based on those other books that previously had done well with this target market of the population, and led to the following design:

4. Twitter Campaigns for Coursefindr

Outside of university I work for a company called Digital Education Marketing and I am responsible for the social media campaigns for one of our websites; Coursefindr. As previously mentioned, I was able to feature some content that I had made in my placement year, and so using my social media campaigns for Coursefindr was an obvious move! Our target market for Coursefindr is undergraduate students looking for courses to study at university, and so using persuasive yet informative language is a must. Also taking into consideration that this target market group are highly tech savvy, tagging third party institutions and using hashtags is desirable. Some example twitter campaigns can be seen below: